How to Permanently Set the US-Version of NBA.COM as Your Default by Playing With Your Browser-Cookies
If you are a basketball-fan and you are also currently living outside the US, the behavior of the NBA.com website can be quite a pain. In Germany for instance, it automatically redirects to a German version of the site. And every sports-fan knows how much of a bummer it can be if your local sports reporting is being robbed of its natural language. I, for my part, strongly prefer the US version of nba.com and I know many others who feel the same way. While the site gives you the option to set your default version in the header, it only accepts this setting for seven days. After that week, you’ll be sent right back to Spox.
I will quickly show you why & how it does that and how you can easily modify this behavior by editing your browser cookies. This quick guide will focus on Google Chrome — the process for other browsers is quite similar, though.
Step 1: Set US as your default edition and go to nba.com
The website stores this setting in a cookie. Cookies are files that are saved in your local browser and store information about the user. This particular one stores the information, which version of the NBA-site should be shown to you once you type in nba.com. Whenever a cookie is placed on your local machine, its persistence-time is configured as well. All we have to do is find that cookie and edit its expiration-date.
Step 2: Fire up the developer tools and find that cookie
Open up the Dev-Tools in your browser (F12), navigate to the Application tab and go to Storage > Cookies > http://www.nba.com:
As you can see, the site drops an enormous amount of cookies. By browsing through the expiration-dates you can quickly single out the one that saves the information we are looking for — it is the only one that expires seven days from today:
Step 3: Use a Chrome extension to edit the expiration-date of the cookie we just identified
While you can quickly write your own code to manually modify a cookie, it is even easier to use a Chrome extension for this. There are several ones available. I’d recommend Edit This Cookie or Cookie Inspector.
Open the extension while on nba.com, find our cookie and set the Expiration-field to whatever date you want. And there you have it — all done: All-American NBA-content by default.
However, please note that cookies are stored within the specific browser of the device that you are using. That means, you will still get redirected if you use another device, another browser, the incognito-mode, or delete your cookies altogether.
— Feel free to reach out if you have some questions or want to say Hi —
